Welcome » Case Studies » Cronos Group – Cronnect – AI-powered Expertise Discovery Platform
AWS CASE STUDY
Executive Summary
Cronos Group, Belgium’s largest IT group with thousands of employees spread across
hundreds of sister companies, struggled to identify who had which expertise across the
organization. This made cross-company collaboration, referrals, and resource allocation
slow and inefficient.
To solve this, the Cronnect platform was built on AWS as an AI-powered expertise
discovery solution that combines Odoo ERP with Amazon Bedrock to deliver natural
language search and semantic expertise mapping.
Cronnect provides a single, scalable, secure hub for discovering skills, capabilities, and
relevant teams across the entire group.
CUSTOMER:
Cronos Group
PROJECT:
FIRST LAUNCH:
August, 2025
Customer Profile
Founded in 1991 in Belgium, Cronos Group has grown from a singleperson
initiative into one of Europe’s largest technology ecosystems.
The group employs over 9500 people and operates through more than 570 companies, with new ventures launched at a rate of 20+ startups per year.
Cronos spans multiple innovative sectors, acting simultaneously as early-stage investor, incubator, integrator, and venture builder.
Its companies specialize in pioneering and commercializing emerging technologies across industries such as media, finance, utilities, and professional services.
The group’s mission remains rooted in fostering entrepreneurship and enabling technology specialists to grow new ideas into impactful businesses.
The Challenge
Cronos Group’s biggest strength also created a structural challenge: there was no central, reliable way to understand who knows what, across the highly distributed network of specialized companies.
Key pain points included:
- No unified view of technical capabilities across roughly 600 companies
- Difficulty identifying the best internal company or expert for a specific
technology, stack, or niche use case - Limited tooling to support structured referrals or cross-company collaboration
- No internal platform for natural language search on expertise (“Who has experience with X in sector Y?”)
Without a centralized expertise discovery platform, collaboration opportunities were frequently missed, internal referrals depended heavily on informal networks, and resource allocation relied on personal connections rather than data. This led to slower deal execution, less reuse of existing know-how, and reduced visibility for highly specialized teams that could have supported more projects across the group.
Why AWS?
Cronos Group needed a platform that could scale to thousands of users, integrate modern AI capabilities, and remain secure while handling sensitive internal information. AWS provided the ideal foundation: the combination of managed scalability, high availability by design, integrated generative AI and strong security & governance services, allowed Cronos Group to deploy a modern, AI-enabled internal platform with low operational overhead and predictable costs.
Why Cloudar?
Cronos Group selected a partner with deep AWS expertise, experience in containerized enterprise applications, and a strong track record in building production-ready platforms that blend business applications with AI services. The partner brought Proven experience running Odoo in containerized, scalable AWS environments, strong architectural knowledge of ECS, Aurora, EFS, and VPC patterns, hands-on experience integrating Amazon Bedrock into real-world applications for semantic and natural language experiences, and a structured approach using Infrastructure as Code to ensure repeatability, maintainability, and auditability.
This combination of cloud-native, ERP, and GenAI skills made the partner uniquely positioned to design and deliver Cronnect as a strategic internal platform rather than just a standalone application.
Partner Solution
Cloudar delivered Cronnect as a scalable, AI-enabled expertise discovery platform built entirely on AWS. The core application runs on Amazon ECS with containerized Odoo ERP, providing predictable scaling and easy deployment across multiple Availability Zones.
An Application Load Balancer manages inbound traffic, while Amazon Route 53 handles DNS.
All application data is stored in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, chosen for its high availability, automatic backups, and seamless failover. Amazon EFS provides shared storage across ECS tasks for attachments and Odoo modules. Outbound traffic from private subnets is routed through a NAT Gateway, enabling updates and external API calls.
To enable natural language and semantic expertise search, Cronnect integrates Amazon Bedrock, giving users an intuitive way to find skills and capabilities across the group without relying on rigid keyword matching.
Security and configuration are centralized using AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, while a multi-AZ VPC layout with strict security groups ensures network isolation and compliance.
Results and Benefits
Cronnect delivered clear, measurable impact across the Cronos Group. Some technical outcomes include:
- Production-grade platform: A fully deployed, production-ready Odoo-based system tailored to expertise discovery.
- High availability: Multi-AZ architecture with ECS and Aurora provides robust continuity and resilience.
- AI integration: Amazon Bedrock brings natural language and semantic search to a traditional ERP-style system, significantly improving usability.
- Scalable design: ECS Auto Scaling supports usage across 9,500+ employees, with headroom for further growth.
- Secure-by-design: Private subnets, security groups, managed secrets, and controlled access deliver a strong security posture.
But also the business impact was significant:
- Business development and project teams can now easily identify the right internal partners and companies, accelerating cross-company deals and engagements. Leadership and project managers gain clearer insight into where specific skills reside and how they can be mobilized.
- Natural language search powered by Amazon Bedrock reduces friction, because users don’t need to know exact tags or codes to find the right expertise. Specialist teams can be more easily “found” and involved in projects, increasing utilization and internal visibility.
Partner Solution
Future enhancements for Cronnect include deeper integration of graph-based relationship modeling (GraphRAG-style patterns), extended AI capabilities for recommendations and matchmaking, and expanded analytics for leadership to understand technology trends, capability clusters, and collaboration patterns across the group.
